Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...anyone has a reason to be skittish about space debris, it's the people of Texas. It's in Houston, after all, that much of what we launch into orbit is monitored. And it's in rural Texas that much of the flaming wreckage of the shuttle Columbia landed in 2003. Sunday morning, it looked like Texas was in the path of danger again, when police received numerous reports of a sonic boom, a visible fireball and debris descending in various spots around the state. That debris, people figured, had to be space junk reentering from Tuesday's collision between...
...space travel survivable at all? Because all speed is relative. A satellite orbiting Earth may be moving at 17,500 m.p.h., but so is every other object in the same orbital corridor. Relative to one another, they're standing still. If one happened to speed up to 17,505 m.p.h., the most it could do is nudge another ship at 5 m.p.h. Attaining orbit is like entering an expressway: the tricky part is merging; once you're there, all you have to do is maintain your speed, and you'll be fine. (Read "Are We Bringing Our Germs to Mars...
...think those tiny pieces of junk can't do much harm, think again. According to a back-of-the-envelope rule the Apollo astronauts used, given the speeds involved in traveling in low-Earth orbit, a one-tenth-in. bit of chaff would collide with an oncoming spacecraft with as much force as a bowling ball traveling 60 m.p.h...
...trouble comes when speed - or worse, the angle - of orbit changes. Things in higher orbits move more slowly than things in lower ones. A dead satellite or one that has lost gyroscopic control could go tumbling down to lower and lower orbits, colliding with objects moving at different speeds along the way. Similarly, the International Space Station and its three astronauts do, in theory, lie in the path of the debris created by Tuesday's collision, and while international space officials believe the danger to the crew is low, they do not rule...
True killer collisions occur not when spacecraft traveling in the same band or orbital plane bump each other but when there's a full-blown crash between two ships in different planes - say, between one ship in an orbit that carries it over the U.S. and Central Asia, and another in an orbit that carries it over Western Europe and Eastern Asia. That's what happened on Tuesday...